Gaming Recap - Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-earth, T.I.M.E. Stories, and Mystic Vale

Gaming Recap - Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-earth, T.I.M.E. Stories, and Mystic Vale

Ehhhhh...

This weekend, I got in a bunch of games I don't get to play very often, so while I'm not one for celebrating July 4th, I'm absolutely going to celebrate eating good food and playing good games with good friends. I've mentioned before that I enjoy campaign games, but rarely have the time or same group of players to really dig into many of them. Descent and Imperial Assault have kind of been the exceptions in that the same couple of players have gotten together to play them over the course of the past four or five years. But we had also more or less doubled down on Descent to the point where we were playing it almost exclusively whenever we got together. That has since dropped off almost completely. But with a couple of close friends who don't live in St. Louis, I have enjoyed playing Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-earth as well as T.I.M.E. Stories (both the first and revised editions).

We knew coming into this weekend that we were going to play the Shadowed Paths expansion, so that campaign was the focus of the weekend.

The minis are good, but not great, in my opinion. Nevertheless, the game is still worth playing!

For anyone who doesn't know, Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-Earth is a cooperative board game made by Fantasy Flight Games (FFG) that relies on players using a free app to run as an opponent to the players. Each player selects a character from the LotR universe (some famous ones such as Aragorn or Gimli, and some less famous ones, such as Eleanor and Dis), pairs that character with a class (such as Guardian or Smith), and then the characters are a party playing through a board game RPG, leveling up and collecting new gear and abilities as they play through a campaign dictated by the app. It's a cool design, and it's a nice way to facilitate a cooperative game! The tiles that make up the various maps are modular (if a bit non-descript), and as the players move into and discover new places during the campaign, the app dictates which tiles are added to the map, how and where, which tokens and enemies are placed on them, and then the action continues. There are some long campaigns (mission counts in the double digits) and some shorter ones, so you can take your pick of how deep you want to go.

I had sort of forgotten (because we haven't played it in so long!) which parts of the game I find a bit frustrating. Not the least of which are the sort of nondescript tiles and how they fit together to build the map. I think I understand what they were trying to do with more flexibility in map-building than previous games like Descent and Imperial Assault, but I miss the distinct look of the pieces in those latter games. We decided to play on the hard difficulty, and we each picked characters from the expansion so we could try something new. Cushman chose Balin, Biff played Eleanor, and I thought about playing one of the classic characters, but ended up rolling with Gandalf. We decided to keep things simple and just start with the classes suggested for each of our characters (Delver, Traveler, and Meddler, respectively).

I must say that I really do like a bunch of the mechanics they employ in the game, not the least of which is deck-building as a way of handling tests and combat (much like Gloomhaven). I like that we can change classes during the campaign, and I appreciate that the app handles most of the game fairly elegantly. I think FFG has really learned from past endeavors to create board games centered on apps, and they've applied a lot of those lessons to new endeavors. That said, the game is not a cheap one, and I don't really appreciate how little digital content they have developed compared to the amount of money we spent on the physical content. I don't know how much work goes into developing the digital content, so I won't really say, "By now, they should have x amount of content out because programming and bits and bytes and such."

I can click all the buttons! It's just what happens next that tends to be problematic.

So we started the campaign, won the first mission, had fun, then got to the second mission. And we took a brutal loss. Honestly, I can't even remember if it just wasn't close, or it came down to the wire and we came up short. (Why, you ask? Because we played a total of 16 missions. And that's a damn lot.) We played the third mission, got absolutely wrecked, and everyone just sort of hated where we were. I was playing Gandalf as the Meddler all wrong and it had cost us. While Biff and Cushman liked Eleanor and Balin (respectively), neither felt particularly good about the Traveler and Delver (again, respectively). It felt like there was no synergy whatsoever within the group; we were just three characters in a game who were teaming up, but not actually clicking. And in a game like this on Hard Mode, that tends to be a death sentence. So we decided to scrap it. Honestly, we've got waaaayyyyy too much experience trying to cram a campaign of some such into a gaming weekend (given none of us live within anywhere from 3-14 hours from each other anymore), and we've seen that go south. We can get frustrated, we push too hard to get it all done instead of, you know, remembering to have fun. So we scrapped it and started fresh before we were so deep that we felt as though we couldn't.

So I decided to stick with Gandalf the Meddler because now that I had figured out how to leverage him, I wanted to take a second shot. We could see the potential. Cushman stuck with Balin, but decided to make him a Guardian so we weren't so vulnerable to counterattacks. Especially if we had to ignore an enemy or two in order to focus on the objective. Oftentimes, in campaign board games like this, it's easy to get bogged down in trying to clear the board of enemies. Next thing you know, the clock has run out and we lose the mission. So striking a balance is crucial, and we can only do that if we're able to weather attacks from time to time. Biff decided to outfit Eleanor with the Captain class because it is so strong in any party. Gandalf as the Meddler especially appreciates having ALL THE INSPIRATION. Inspiration is the fuel that makes his machine run, and once it gets going, it is really hard to stop. I am particularly fond of combining the Contemplation and Hidden Plans skills. For anyone familiar with the game, Contemplation allows the Meddler to have up to 6 prepared skills at the same time (instead of the standard 4), and then Hidden Plans allows the Meddler to discard it in order to Scout 4 and prepare up to 3 additional skills (which I now have the capacity to keep, courtesy of Contemplation). And Gandalf's special ability likes to see him discard a prepared skill with a leaf icon because then he gains an Inspiration and Scouts 1. There are other cool builds I can see with that combination of character and class, but I was all in on this one, and it paid dividends time and again and again.

So we began again. I won't get into details, because I don't want to ruin it for anyone. The story is the majority of the fun. But I will say that we took a slightly different path this time, prioritized differently, and it paid off. We lost a few missions, we had some close calls. But honestly, once we got rolling, we were rolling. The threat timer on each level came close to the end several times, but even so, we were pretty confident we could beat the clock to the victory condition, and we were nearly always right. I will say this: we were REAL tired by the time we reached the final mission. We'd played through 15 missions over the course of 3 days, and that's a lot of time spent on this particular game. We really wanted to finish it, but we were also honestly tired of binging this game, and just tired! So we committed to finishing this final mission, which we started setting up and playing around 7:30pm. There was a lot of back and forth, the vast majority of our decisions were good, and we really felt comfortable that we had the mission handled. But the hours ticked by, and we got more tired, and a couple of designed setbacks left us frustrated, which was expounded by our exhaustion. I know it's the last mission, I know it should be an epic conclusion, but we spent four and a half hours working on this thing, and that was just too much. We didn't take a break or anything, just short bathroom or discussion breaks to figure out our plan of attack. But honestly, it was just too damn long to spend at the culmination of a campaign. And if our synergy was not so strong and our choices hadn't nearly all panned out, it would have all been for nothing. Because we literally won this mission with the final action of the final available turn before the timer would have run out.

Normally, that's exactly the kind of ending we want, right? We want tension, we want drama, we want to win on the last tick so it all pays off! That makes it fun!! But besides cramming this 13 mission campaign into 3 days, that last mission was just too damn long and required real precision to land the victory in the end. The length of the final mission is really what sort of had us so exasperated that, by the time we finished it, we let the epilogue run and listened to it while we started cleaning up the game. Hard to enjoy the victory when we're just that tired. So a word to the wise: don't try and cram this campaign into a long weekend (or, God forbid, a short weekend!). We had to because we just don't see each other that often and I can't play any games on Tabletop Simulator (I'm not even sure if this game is on TTS), so we pushed ourselves. And I'm glad we did! But that last mission would've been too long under other circumstances too. So, just know that if you're going to delve into this campaign, plan accordingly!

I have T.I.M.E. Stories listed here because we played the Estella Drive expansion pack. But on Biff's advice, I'm not going to delve into this here. He said that it deserves its own write-up, and I agree. So I will be linking to it here just a little later this week, and feel free to click on it if you like! But be warned that there are a couple of spoilers, so if you have any intention of playing Estella Drive and have not done so yet, then click on the link at your own risk!

Lastly, Cushman finally got to teach me Mystic Vale between LotR quests. He had told me about this game maybe a year or two ago and had described the really unique "card building" mechanic it employs. We discussed it from a game design standpoint, and the notion of purchasing upgrades that got slipped into sleeves, thereby enhancing pre-existing cards in my deck (and thus functions as deck-building through the mechanic of "card-building") just sounded like something I really needed to experience for myself. So I went out and bought a copy of the game because it's really reasonably-priced, and I read the rules. They sounded good, but I really needed to play the game to grasp how the game worked. Aaaaaannnnnnddddd it just wasn't happening. I wasn't getting around to it. I was extremely interested in the mechanic, but not interested enough in the game itself to bring it to the table to play. My gaming experience during that stretch of time was so limited owing to COVID-19 that if I did get something to the table, it had to be something I was really jonesing to play, you know?

Imma steal a description of the game from Boardgamegeek because I'm tired enough that my brain can't possibly write up a description that is superior to the one they have there. Whenever you want to learn about a board game, Boardgamegeek is a great place to go. Mystic Vale: "A curse has been placed on the Valley of Life. Hearing the spirits of nature cry out for aid, clans of druids have arrived, determined to use their blessings to heal the land and rescue the spirits. It will require courage and also caution, as the curse can overwhelm the careless who wield too much power.

In Mystic Vale, 2 to 4 players take on the role of druidic clans trying to cleanse the curse upon the land. Each turn, you play cards into your field to gain powerful advancements and useful vale cards. Use your power wisely, or decay will end your turn prematurely. Score the most victory points to win the game!

Mystic Vale uses the innovative "Card Crafting System", which lets you not only build your deck, but build the individual cards in your deck, customizing each card's abilities to exactly the strategy you want to follow."

So we sat down, he quickly walked me through the rules, and we played. And it was fun! Honestly, the simultaneous action of the game keeps it moving quickly, even though I'd never played it before and Cushman hadn't played it in at least 18 months or so. The mechanic is really interesting, really strong, and the game is really easy to keep track of. There's some math involved regarding victory points and buying power, but it's really very straightforward, which I appreciate. It comes across to me as landing somewhere in the middle of the low complexity/weight spectrum. There can be a lot to unlock, and there are clearly countless ways to score the VP you need to win the game. But ultimately, you want buying power so you can build synergy so you can score VP, and that's how you win the game. So the goal of the game and the way you achieve that goal is very simple. But I also think this game is for 3-4 players rather than 2-4 as advertised. I was playing for the first time, but I lucked into a combo of two cards that acted as the foundation of my machine too early and too effectively. Cushman had one bad turn wherein he pushed for another card, drew another Decay card, and Spoiled (which meant he missed out on a Harvest phase, which effectively cost him his turn).

After that, I rolled him.

Harsh, but true.

I was snatching up all the most valuable cards, I was basically drawing out my entire deck every turn, and it was a no contest situation. This was not owing to my superior skill. Not by a long shot. But three things broke my way very early in the game (two cards I purchased, as well as Cushman Spoiling early, allowing me to grow unchecked), and it meant he was always going to be 1-2 steps behind me. With third and fourth players, I think I could've been checked and balance could've been restored to the game. But with two, if things break a certain way, someone can run away with the game very easily. And that's just not fun. So while I am so glad I finally got to play and I really like the design and the components and such, I would only play this game with higher player counts. In my opinion, this is not at all a game for two players.

Anyway, that was the weekend! I had a blast, and I'm so glad we finally got to play the Shadowed Paths campaign so we had an excuse to break out Journeys in Middle-earth again! But man, it was a slog at times. Most of it fun, some of it not so much, and a real time-sink. But I also find time and again that this is not the kind of game I can play with most people, and it's really a testament to how much I enjoy and value time with these particular friends that our frustration never boiled over and that it was, overall, a great weekend. Hope you read something you enjoyed!